When Joshua Bringhurst thinks about foster care, he does not start with paperwork, court hearings or placement numbers.
He remembers his sisters.
Bringhurst said his parents abused him while he was growing up in Riverside County. Eventually, he entered foster care, an experience he says left him afraid and struggling to trust the adults who were supposed to protect him.
“Not being able to trust the people who were supposed to protect me,” he said. “Having a lot of fear, living in both fight and flight.”
He had two younger sisters. Then they were separated.
“I tried my best to protect them growing up,” he said. “When we were all split apart, it felt impossible to still do that, and I felt like I was losing a part of me.”
For a child leaving an unsafe home, removal may be necessary for safety.
But safety does not mean the disruption stops.
A child may lose daily contact with parents and siblings, change schools, move between placements and learn which adults will still be there tomorrow.
For Latino children in Los Angeles County, those questions affect a large share of the child-welfare population.
L.A. County’s child-welfare system is heavily Latino
Nearly 20,000 children were receiving child-welfare services through the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services at the end of 2024. Of those, 11,838 were Hispanic — about 60%, according to Los Angeles County data.
That does not mean all of those children were living in foster homes. The county’s caseload includes family-maintenance, reunification, permanent-placement and other services.
That distinction matters.
Still, the numbers show why family, culture and belonging cannot be separated from the child-welfare system.
Los Angeles County has acknowledged that culture and language matter. In a campaign focused on Latino foster children, the county said Spanish-speaking families can help children maintain cultural traditions and language after removal from their birth families.
you can also read on the difficult childhood experiences that affect Latino children, including how early disadvantages can shape a child’s life long before adulthood.
This is where Court Appointed Special Advocates, or CASAs, come in.
CASA of Los Angeles trains community volunteers who are appointed to advocate for children in the child-welfare system. A CASA can spend time with a child, learn what is happening in that child’s life and bring the child’s needs to the court.
The role is not to replace a parent, social worker or attorney.
It is to add another adult whose job is to keep the child’s interests in view and, ideally, to keep showing up.
Research has linked placement instability with emotional and behavioral difficulties, although researchers caution that instability is only one factor shaping outcomes.
But a CASA cannot fix what brought a child into care
It would be easy to turn this into a simple story about volunteers changing children’s lives.
The evidence is not that simple.
A large Texas study of more than 31,000 foster children found different permanency outcomes for children assigned CASAs compared with those who were not. The researchers also found important differences between the groups, including case characteristics that can affect who receives a CASA. That makes it difficult to say the CASA relationship itself caused the different outcomes.
So we should not tell families that having a CASA guarantees reunification, adoption, graduation or a better life.
It does not.
What we can say is more modest and more honest.
A CASA can listen.
A CASA can notice.
A CASA can advocate.
And a CASA can become one more adult who knows the child’s story.
Recent research links foster-care experiences with instability and cumulative disadvantage across education, health and relationships. But those outcomes are shaped by many factors, including the trauma and adversity that brought a child into the system.
It is that distinction that matters when we talk about Latino children.
A system serving so many Latino children has to ask whether it is doing enough to protect the relationships, language and cultural connections that help children know where they come from.
There is another part of the story: prevention.
Los Angeles County already has programs designed to help families before a crisis becomes a foster-care placement. Find out more by reading this previous article about California’s Family First prevention system and support for families
That’s crutial because prevention changes the question. Instead of asking only what happens after a child enters the system, it asks whether families can get meaningful help before a crisis reaches that point.
Removing a child from an unsafe situation does not erase the need for family, siblings, language, culture or belonging.
It does not erase the need for someone to show up.
Bringhurst remembers what happened when he and his sisters were separated.
He was trying to protect them, and suddenly he could not.
A CASA cannot undo that loss or replace a parent.
But they can show up.
They can listen.
They can remain a familiar face while the rest of a child’s world keeps changing.
For a child moving through foster care, that consistency may not fix everything.
But sometimes, the first step toward trust is simply learning that not every adult leaves.
